How much does a small business website cost in Australia?

Short answer: in Australia, having a professional small-business website built usually costs between $1,500 and $10,000 up front, then $20 to $300 a month to keep it running. Do it yourself on a builder like Wix and the upfront cost drops to almost nothing — but you pay in time, and usually in a site that doesn’t bring in the work. Here’s the honest breakdown, and a third option most people don’t know exists.

There are two numbers, not one

The mistake almost everyone makes is asking “what does a website cost?” as if it’s a single figure. It’s two. There’s the build — the one-off cost to design and put the site together — and there’s the running cost, the money it quietly takes every month after that to host, secure and maintain. The build is the number on the quote. The running cost is the one that follows you for years, and it’s the one most people forget to ask about.

What each option really costs to build

Here’s roughly what you’ll pay in 2026, depending on who builds it:

Those ranges move with how many pages you need, whether you sell online, and whether someone writes the words and takes the photos or you hand them over.

The costs nobody puts on the quote

Whatever you spend to build it, a website keeps costing money to run. A domain name is $15 to $30 a year. Decent hosting runs $10 to $50 a month. Then there’s the SSL certificate that puts the padlock in the address bar, the security and backups that stop a hack wiping you out, and the updates that keep the site from ageing — usually sold as a care plan at $50 to $300 a month. Skip the upkeep and the site slowly gets slower, less secure, and less trusted by Google.

Why building it yourself usually costs the most

It’s tempting to save the money and build it yourself on a $20-a-month builder over a weekend. The few hundred dollars you save is real. The trouble is everything it quietly costs you afterwards — and none of it shows up on a bill.

It tells people you cut corners. Your website is your shopfront, and a stranger can’t inspect your actual work before they hire you — the site is the only evidence they have. When it looks slapped together, they don’t think “good on them for saving money.” They think “if they’re this casual about the thing everyone sees, what are they like on the job?” — and they move on. The research backs the instinct: 94% of first impressions of a website are about its design, not its words (Stanford University), and three in four people admit they judge a business’s credibility on how its site looks.

And it looks fine to you. That’s the trap. Most of us don’t have an eye for design — and you built the thing, so you already know what every button does and how good the business really is. You cannot see it the way a first-time visitor does. “That’ll do” to the owner reads as “behind the times” to the stranger you needed to win. You are the worst-placed person alive to judge your own website.

It isn’t built to be found. And the damage isn’t only skin deep. Drag-and-drop builders bolt your site together from heavy templates that pile on code you’ll never use, so the page loads slowly and the structure underneath is a mess. That matters more than ever, because being found today means being readable by Google and by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. They reward fast, cleanly-built sites with the right data under the hood, and quietly skip the bloated, generic ones. A DIY site can look passable on the surface and still be invisible in the exact place your next customer is searching.

Now put a number on it. Almost no one does, because a bounce leaves no trace — no voicemail, no enquiry, no record that a ready-to-buy customer ever landed and left. But you can estimate the leak with figures you already know:

Monthly visitors × the extra share who bounce off a poor site × the slice of those who’d have bought × your average job value = money walking out the door.
Say 200 people find you in a month. A slow, dated site pushes an extra 30 of them straight back to the results before they engage. If just one in ten of those would have called, that’s three jobs. At an $800 average job, that’s about $2,400 a month — nearly $29,000 a year — handed to whoever’s website looked the part.

Plug in your own visitors and your own job value and the figure will move, but the shape never changes: the saving on a DIY build is small change, and the leak it opens is real, recurring money. The cheap option doesn’t remove the cost. It just hides the bill where you’ll never read it — while a better-looking competitor quietly cashes it.

A different way to pay for it

There’s a third option that sidesteps the upfront bill entirely. Instead of charging thousands to build the site and a separate fee to host it, Propeller builds your website for free — $0 setup — and you pay one simple month-to-month plan from $129 that rolls the whole running cost into a single, predictable figure.

You own your domain and the site, there’s no lock-in, and you can cancel anytime. The build is free because the business runs on the monthly plan, not a big one-off invoice — so we have to keep earning it.

So what should you actually spend?

Stop thinking of a website as a one-off purchase and start thinking of it as a salesperson that works every hour of every day. On that view, the upfront price matters far less than whether the site is fast, professional and kept up to date — because an out-of-date site quietly loses work, no matter how little you paid for it. For most Australian small businesses, the smart spend is whatever keeps a good site live and maintained, not the lowest number on a quote. That’s the whole idea behind a free build on a low monthly plan: a great site, kept great, with no reason to ever let it slide.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a small business website cost in Australia?

In Australia, a professionally built small-business website typically costs between $1,500 and $10,000 upfront — less with a freelancer, more with an agency — plus ongoing running costs of roughly $20 to $300 a month for hosting, domain and maintenance. DIY builders like Wix or Squarespace are cheaper upfront (often $0–$50/month) but cost you time and rarely rank or convert as well. Propeller takes a different approach: the build is free with $0 setup, and you pay a single month-to-month plan from $129 that covers hosting, support, updates and AI-search optimisation.

How much does a tradie website cost?

A tradie website in Australia usually costs $1,000 to $5,000 to build with a freelancer or small agency, plus ongoing hosting and maintenance. Most tradies don’t need a large site — a handful of well-built pages that load fast, work on a phone and make it easy to call you. Propeller builds tradie websites for free and charges a monthly plan from $129 that includes hosting, support and getting you found in Google and AI search, so there is no upfront bill.

Is it cheaper to build my own website or hire someone?

DIY builders look cheaper, but for most small businesses hiring someone works out better value once you count your time and the cost of a site that doesn’t convert. A weekend DIY build can lose you a single high-value job in its first week — far more than the few hundred dollars you saved. The real comparison isn’t the build price; it’s how much work the site wins you. Propeller removes the trade-off: a professionally built site with no upfront cost, on a plan from $129/month.

What are the ongoing costs of a website?

Beyond the build, a website has running costs most people forget: a domain name ($15–$30 a year), hosting ($10–$50 a month), an SSL certificate, security and backups, and ongoing updates or a care plan ($50–$300 a month). They add up, and a neglected site gets slow and insecure. Propeller bundles all of it — hosting, global CDN, SSL, daily backups, security and updates — into one monthly plan from $129, with no surprise add-ons.

How much should a small business spend on a website?

Treat a website as a salesperson that works 24/7, not a one-off cost. For most Australian small businesses, the sensible budget is enough for a fast, professional, mobile-first site that’s kept up to date — and the ongoing investment matters more than the upfront price, because an out-of-date site quietly loses work. Propeller’s model is built for this: free to build, then a predictable monthly plan from $129 that keeps the site fast, found and converting.

Can you get a website for free?

Yes — Propeller builds your website for free, with $0 setup and no upfront design fee (a build that would typically cost $3,000 or more). Instead of a big bill on day one, you pay a simple month-to-month plan from $129 that covers hosting, support, updates and getting found in Google and AI search. You own your domain and the site, with no lock-in.